On Reclaiming Pleasure

Wild poppies & finding our ground in shifting terrain

I'm returning from a spacious digital hiatus feeling renewed and grounded within body and place.

This deepening into the physical—into the material body, in the sensual experience of real time, in the unfolding of self and the world around me—has been my ongoing practice and inquiry. It is a movement toward the Venusian: of psyche or soul not just as some abstract idea but embodied within form.

In De Anima (On the Soul), the ancient Greek Aristotle explored the body as the soul taken shape. In his philosophy, the soul (note “psyche” comes from the Greek word for soul) is the organizing principle of form that gives the body both structure and function.

“The soul is the actuality (entelecheia) of a body that has life potentially.” (De Anima, II.1)

With this view, body and soul—or psyche and form—are not separate. The soul cannot exist without the body—it’s not a “thing” on its own, but rather that actualization of the body’s potential to live. The body is the living incarnation of soul: psyche taken shape.

So often we deny the body its validity, seeing symptoms and sensations as obstacles to transcend or eliminate. We treat fatigue as weakness, desire as distraction, pain as pathology. In many spiritual traditions, there’s a tendency to reach up and out—toward abstract purity, toward escape—while the body waits below, fluent in a language we’ve forgotten to hear.

But what if soul isn’t floating above us like some misty ether—but pressing into our skin and the soles of our feet? What if every tremble, every pulse, every ache is soul speaking through matter, not in spite of it?

What if the body holds the key to our untapped wisdom? What if the doors to our heart’s truth lie hidden beneath our symptoms, grief, and deepest fears? What happens if we let the body show us the way?

Here on the island, as spring quickens into fullness, the fields and hillsides have turned red with wild poppies—paparounes—flaring open like small fires from the earth. Their fragile petals tremble in the breeze, ephemeral yet unmissable, arriving each year as heralds of renewal.

In the lineage of this land, Aphrodite—goddess of love, beauty, and bodily pleasure—is not merely the soft patroness of romance we so often reduce her to. She is the force of embodied aliveness, of ripening, of blooming. Born from seafoam and blood, she emerges not in denial of the physical, but through it. Her power is not ethereal, but rooted in sensation, desire, and the regenerative cycles of the earth.

The poppy is one of her sacred flowers—a symbol of both sleep and awakening, of death and rebirth. In ancient Greece, it was associated not only with Aphrodite but with Demeter and Persephone, and the mystery of descent and return. The paparouna, then, becomes a threshold: a flare of beauty that marks the body’s participation in the greater rhythms of life, death, and re-becoming.

To walk among these fragile blood-red flowers is to remember: the body, too, is a seasonal creature. We bloom, we rest, we die a thousand small deaths, and still we rise red and trembling toward the light.

When I press my bare feet to the warming earth and let my senses widen, I feel this lineage—not in thought, but in pulse. The pleasure of being alive, fully here, is not a luxury. It is a sacred rite. Aphrodite teaches that beauty is not decorative, but devotional. That pleasure, when honored, restores.

It’s in small returns that I remember: the first bite of plum on the tongue, the salt air cooling the back of my neck and shoulders, the dense, animal calm that arrives when I rest my weight fully into the ground, feeling the strength of ancient stone. These are not indulgences but thresholds.

Amidst the profound unraveling happening in our cultural spheres (a movement that will continue over the next years, birthing radical new structures of relation), grounding into the physical is imperative. The mind can no longer seek security in the old ways of being—these ways are being dismantled and renewed. Dropping into the body, accessing pleasure, being reminded of beauty, simplicity, and embodied connection, we are reminded of continuity, of that which remains beyond the shifting facade of politics, language, identities, worldviews, and authoritative frameworks and structures.

This shifting terrain is a source of anxiety and tension—where the unknown and uncertain feel wildly ungrounding. There is a sense of urgency and constant emergency (sites of emergence) in a cultural landscape under seismic shift. Slowing down, we begin to sense how exhausting and ultimately futile it can be to respond reactively to each turn of page. We see the way it wears down our ability to be present and respond with wisdom of the longterm. What if, instead, we tune into what the body needs, seeing it as the key to our psychic individuation?

When we see the body as the form of soul, we can honor that the body’s symptoms are signals pointing us toward what needs tending within us. Our grief becomes an invitation to feel the love within us that has been displaced. Our fatigue becomes a portal to rest and return to awareness of the forgotten and denied body and what it needs in order to feel nurtured and restored. Our pain points us to places of tenderness that ask for our own mothering love. Rather than jumping to quickly fix and resume life as usual, can we slow down and be deeply present with the soulful messages and wisdom the body might offer us in carving the path forward, in reenvisioning a future in which the soul can thrive?

The body as a site of wisdom and pleasure becomes radically subversive in a culture bent on speed, extraction, and control. To choose pleasure—not as consumption but as presence—is to reclaim the body’s capacity to feel, to know, to guide. It is to reinhabit our animal knowing, our feminine intelligence, our rootedness in a deeper rhythm than the machinery of urgency allows.

Here, we meet Aphrodite. Not as a mere symbol of surface beauty, but as a deep force of sovereign sensuality—the intelligence of beauty, the power of softness, the insistence that what delights us is also what restores us. Born from the sea, she arrives through rupture, her emergence mythically tied to the churning of the old world. She is not untouched by chaos—she is born through it.

And each spring, the wild poppy returns to the hillsides of this country like a quiet oracle. Blood-red, delicate, and bold, she flares from the earth as if to remind us that life, too, emerges from dissolution. The Greeks once saw her as Aphrodite’s flower, but also as a companion to Persephone, blooming on the edge of the underworld. She teaches us that beauty and death, pleasure and pain, are not opposites—they are interwoven.

To let ourselves bloom again—to follow what is beautiful, simple, pleasurable—is to participate in the soul’s evolution. Not by ascending, but by descending into presence. By rooting ourselves in the body, in the pulse of breath, in the ache of longing and the soft animal joy of being alive.

This is the Venusian path: one of slow renewal, intimate listening, and radical trust in the intelligence of form.